Precision has rarely been my goal in life, especially in music.  I hate the haunt of failure. I hate that I learn notes slowly, that I can barely count, that my breath runs out too soon, that my pitch slips, and that I struggle to “audiate” the first pitch.  With challenging music I am relentlessly refining my erratic voice. Others seem to hear what I struggle to hear.  As they sing, I am tuning and counting, haunted by the inexact sound, the elusive cutoff.

I didn’t expect an innocuous  event like “Adult Choir Camp” to revisit these insecurities, but I was wrong. We would not spend the week just learning notes or improving dynamics. We would be making it beautiful by making it precise.

Jerry Blackstone carves words and music like a sculptor– re-shaping words into vowels, flicking away the consonants, shaving off the dipthongs, spreading phonemes across the crevices, and featuring notes as jewels, until every choral voice takes part in making a beautiful sound.

Not perfection, because the perfect is the enemy of the good. “Better,” “Good enough” he says, and often notices effort: “Good cut-off on that ‘D,’ Basses.” The noticing catches me off guard, because I was feverishly complying with directions, forgetting the goal.  Jerry demands a focused intensity to make each sound better to make the whole more beautiful.

In Adult Choir Camp I huddled with the second basses trying to merge and be anonymous. I tuned myself to the vocal scholar who sat next to me; he nailed every entrance and almost every note. I struggled to hear what he heard, combating the impulse to hum the pitch note. I imitated the vowel sounds Jerry modeled for us, wondering if I was making the same sound or the hideous dipthong sound he mocked. Death by a thousand sound deviations.

In writing I am energized by the challenge of precision: the right word, the felt cadence, the imbalance that pushes a composition toward balance. I am better at words than music. In writing my imprecision makes me want to revise. I keep hearing a better phrase.  In singing my imprecision feels more like a flaw, an essential weakness in my character. I am one public note away from being exposed as an imposter.

But music restores me in places writing does not touch. I wake with the music already running through my head, again in a moment of distraction from routine, again walking down the street, again in my sleep, again in the pauses between writing words, music comes unsummoned.  The music that returns unconsciously never labors or echoes my vocal flaws.  It comes soothing, awakening, pleasing, and so I accept the struggle to reproduce it in my conscious life.

Music has taken charge of my grieving, welling up memory and tears and joy. I wander in oblivion much of the week. Then comes a hymn or anthem on Sunday, and my heart overflows. My emotions are held in check most of a day, except for the moment a song sneaks in, and I am free to sorrow or be comforted in my loss. Kathy and I always had music in common and songs we loved together. The music of her funeral revives me over and over again.

My uncle, Glenn, died 33 years ago, but the buoyant grief of the day of  his funeral returns at the prompting of two hymns: “I Am the Bread of Life,” which ends each verse with “I will raise them up on the last day,” and “Seek Ye First” with its cascading alleluias. Their music is forever linked to my uncle. I can not sing those hymns without tears, but I am not sorry, I am grateful for it.

Both Kathy and Glenn planned their funerals in what we sometimes thought morbid detail. They knew what their final message would be, and both services moved their mourners profoundly. But I cannot remember the scriptures or the eulogies, just the music.  The music haunts and stirs me, when so much of memory has been interred.

In the summer repertoire of Adult Choir Camp “Every Night When the Sun Goes Down” brings me to the wavering moment of sorrow/ joy.  “Every night when the sun goes down, I hang my head and mournful cry.”  The music touches the depths of grief. It rakes the embers to cool them.  The relentless cadence of “every night and every night and every night” reminds me I can not escape my hauntings, however I try.

The song reaches past despair. “If you look up quickly, you will see me passing, passing, passing by — on wings of silver . . .”  It summons you to touch the loss and remember, hope, anticipate. Well, it does that for me. Nothing else does that for me.

“Make it beautiful!” Jerry commanded and cajoled and pleaded.   The music would not be beautiful unless we made it so.   We labored over minutiae of the tempo of “every night and every night,” the dynamics of “when I rise,” the present/absent sound of the “l” in “silver,” tiny moments that would make it beautiful. The precision taxed me; it was laborious, almost smothering.

“Remember you’re telling a story,” he said, and that calmed me a little. I knew the song was my story, along with others. Later the song would wake me and let me rest. It would leave and return and grieve and soothe. It would pay me back a hundred times for the week I spent at Interlochen agonizing about “making it beautiful.” I was not only learning the song, the technique, the discipline. I was learning to heal and capture the elusive sound of beautiful, restorative music.